Thursday, February 25, 2010

edit: Not to be outdone... the house passed the senate extension. How? Well - it's referred to as "Roll Call 67, “On Motion to Concur in Senate Amendments” for H.R. 3961"... buried in the fine print of the medicare physician payment reform act. Of course!!! Afterall - when you're going to have a driveby shooting of the constitution, you need to make sure the doctors get paid. The democrats in the house, of course, didnt want to be seen passing thing thing - afterall it's pretty much cherry on top of 8 years of a Bush Bullshit Sundae...

Oh I know... Lloyd voted the right way. He usually does. Which pisses me off beyond measure because the party is at fault here and i want to be able to hold them accountable... So thank you Lloyd. You're doing the right thing - even if it's in the service of a national failwhale.

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

there really was a time when editorials like this couldn't have run...Maybe the loons were always bad - maybe they just kept the crazy to themselves or into weird little cults that fled into the nether reaches of the desert... but with the advent of the intarwebs and the giant echochambers they've somehow managed to make it all larger than life. IOne crazy homeless guy parked in front of your house screaming about Alien abductions is one thing - but a dozen? a hundred? So many that you find you have to walk on eggshells around anyone around you at work or out with friends at a party lest you accidentally set off a crazy homeless guy alien abduction rant? It just didn't used to be that way.

I just wish there were some way to break them of this behavior - it would be better for them as well as us if they used their brains for something other than their disturbed fantasies - but it isnt going to happen. It's amazing to watch though.

yes - their cash economy is problematic - the same way paying cash at the salt lick is problematic... but it's not like other european entities arent guilty of electronic subterfuge to mask revenue - and though there is some - i'm not seeing nearly as much moral outrage when it comes to focusing on their own wealthy tax dodgers...

so first they stopped serving food...then they started charging for food...then they started charging a fee to use your airmiles...then they started charging for bags...now they're charging for a blanket

Friday, February 05, 2010

So State Farm goes to Florida and they sell homeowners insurance... and hurricanes show up and destroy the homes... and they go to the insurance board (that restricts the price State Farm is able to charge) and the board says 'you cant raise rates 50%' - so they say 'then we're not going to sell insurance to some people'... This seems reasonable. State Farm can't really make a profit selling insurance to people who insist on building villas on the beach... This is the market in action.

The rambling questions that derive from it are

1) is there a right to insurance for homes - no matter where they're built or what they're built of? Of course not. We have rules like 'fireproof shingles' and 'dont build in a floodplane' - and you would think these would be common sense but they are routinely ignored by developers (half the foundations in the town where i grew up cracked because they built the neighborhoods on soft non-compacted prairie land or fill poured into creeks people were unaware of - with developers taking the money, declaring bankruptcy to avoid liability, and starting new companies doing the same thing overnight). So the buyer has some responsibility to make sure they're not buying something crappy... the seller has some responsibility to insure that the product isn't crappy... and we generally have rules in place for things like 'appraisers' to examine things like properties to tell both sides exactly what's going on (and then we commonly find a way to abuse those safeguards - witness, the appraiser system was a huge accelerant for the housing bubble). The idea is that government regulation can act as an umpire in the process - make sure the developer isn't some chav taking a dive in the box in stoppage time.

2) if you have a law that says 'you must have insurance to build a home' - which we do... and people can no longer build villas on the beach... then is there a 'taking' when the insurance board rejects the interest rate rise? Some on our current cournt would say yes. Bob had a villa on the beach... Bob had insurance... the cost to insure Bob's villa had previously been borne by both Bob's premiums and the premiums paid by other people living in cement-block housing behind mountains far from the hurricanes. Because of the insurance board regulating rates - we dont have a pure market system - we've moved some of the fraud gaming up into an earlier stage of the process (instead of someone taking advantage of the system at the back at the expense of the insurers, they'd moved the fraud up into the front at the expense of other homeowners) - but that was part of the equation when Bob bought the land and built the villa...

this gets us to healthcare (which isnt the final stop)...

if a healthcare company can look at your well fed facebook friends and blog posts about food and tweets about how much you love cooking bacon, and through some simple heuristic analysis determine that you're likely to be overweight and suffer from cardiac disease... should they be allowed to say 'Bob is higher risk than Wendy - who's a member of a triathlon facebook group' and charge you a different rate? I know that many insurance plans offer either discounts if you are in a health club, or discounted memberships to health clubs on this basis - but that's the carrot, and this is a bit more invasive stick. In some ways - this means saying 'if someone insists on smoking cigarettes - should they bear the financial burden of that behavior, or should society attack the problem in a backdoor manner - ie we tax the cigarette makers and transfer the money to the entities that are going to have to cover the costs of treating the disease'. We use gas tax this way - the more gas you use, the more tax you pay because the more wear you put on the roads. Big Trucks are weighed at the border crossings to assess penalties if they are doing too much damage to the asphalt. If the answer to all this is no - then should they be allowed to say 'We dont want to insure Bob... people who like duck liver are a huge problem for us financially'... Bob has a right to eat whatever he wants - does he have a right to cheap insurance? or should Bob bear the brunt of the cost for Bob's lifestyle choices.

Wednesday, February 03, 2010

a couple years ago, right before AIG was bailed out, 400m in 'retention bonuses' were negotiated with employees... then no only was the firm found to be insolvent - but was essentially used as a shunt to pour 180 billion dollars into other insolvent financial entities in a manner that would return nothing to the US taxpayer but the goodwill of the banking industry...Last year - the first of the bonuses went out - and people were pissed... threatened to tax it etc... many AIG employees said 'ok, we'll give some back', the media moved on, and low and behold less than half of even the pledged amount was returned.

So in an effort to fend off controversy, today AIG split the bonus they're paying into 2 payments, one to employees still at the firm, one to those that have left due in march. So today, 100m went goes out to the same jackasses that took slightly more last year - only without any pledge to return a dime of it. Another giant sum is due in march, as retention payments, to people who left the firm. I want you to think about that one for a moment.

If you put a 'federal bailouts will void any bonus contracts' rule into effect, ceos will happily drive their companies into the ground so they get paid. Hell - we saw some of that anyway... these guys put my ex-wife's 'its all about me' mantra to shame.

Really - the problem goes back to Reagan. For 30 years we tried it the republican way - we gutted the tax rate on incomes above the top 1% line with the expectation it would 'trickle down'. Looking at what it's done, to the economy, to investment, to wages, to median incomes, to the standard of living... i'd say 'big bag o fail' is an apt description. How about we try it my way for 30 years... All compensation totalling $1m per year is taxed at 50%. Over $10m per year at 90%. Money to be delivered directly to poor and middle class schools in wheelbarrows.